A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) outlines how your organization will resume operation following disruptions such as equipment failures, power outages, cyber-crime, floods, fires, and any other unplanned incident that results in a loss of data or cuts off access to your IT infrastructure.
Having a clearly defined plan in place to handle problems minimizes the impact of incidents – reducing downtime and containing data loss as well as potentially disastrous security breaches. Moreover, privacy laws and security standards for many businesses now require DRPs, and failure to have one can result in compliance violations, fines, and cybersecurity insurance headaches.
Mitigating the effects of these disruptions centers on how to protect essential data from being lost entirely, and how to regain access to data and services as quickly as possible. But pursuing those goals for the first time during a period of long disruption is a fool’s errand; coming up with a DRP ahead of time is critical.
Depending on the size of your organization, the services you rely on, and the operational and financial impact of disruptions, your DRP could be anywhere from two to a hundred pages long. The idea is to have a playbook ready to execute when disaster strikes, and all the systems set up ahead of time to make sure that playbook goes off without a hitch when it is needed.
Macktez has led or participated in DRP development for many years. We start with conversations that guide stakeholders through a series of scenarios and potential outcomes, and use the information we gather to flesh out a plan, identify and address any missing supporting infrastructure, and draft a specific policy tailored to fit your organization’s needs.
We’ll also schedule ongoing DRP testing to confirm periodically that all the elements of the DRP — systems in use, recovery time objectives, data priorities, budget constraints —get updated when circumstances change.
So, what’s the plan to protect your organization’s operations, in the event of a disaster? If you’re not sure your policies are comprehensive, resilient, and easy to follow, give us a call.